ay quite well get into our
food through "washing up".

The Boers have almost raised trench digging to the level of a fine art,
and on every occasion when their commandants have found it necessary to
withdraw they have had an entrenched position ready for them at some
distance in the rear. At Modder River the trenches on either side of
the stream were, as far as I saw them, a series of short ditches holding
about six riflemen. These small trenches were separated from each other
in order possibly to avoid that appearance of continuity which would
have rendered their detection more easy to our scouts. In the Modder
River fight a new factor is noticeable. For the first time in the
campaign the Boers fought on level ground. Hitherto their bullets had
come from the summits of the hills, and for this reason had not proved
nearly so effective as a sustained fire from rifles raised, say, about
four and a half feet from the ground. It is of course very much harder
to hit a moving enemy when you aim from above at a considerable angle
than when you merely hold your rifle steadily at the level of his chest
and fire off Mauser cartridges at the rate of twenty a minute. The
enemy's fire was very deadly at the Modder. As Lord Methuen said in his
despatch, it was quite unsafe to remain on horseback at 2,000 yards'
range. The result was that our infantry were compelled to lie prone on
the ground, and, without being able to do much by way of retaliation,
were exposed for hours to a scathing fusilade from the trenches beside
the river. One poor fellow, of whom I saw a good deal, had been through
the battle despite the fact that he was suffering great pain from
dysentery. He, together with two friends, lay on the veldt for no less
than fourteen hours. They had fortunately descried a slight hollow in
the ground some 500 yards from the Boer trenches, and between them they
"loosed off" quite 1,000 rounds of ammunition. "Well," I asked him, "did
you hit anything?" "I don't think we did," was his reply, "because we
never saw a Boer the whole day." When the enemy are firing smokeless
powder behind their splendidly constructed earthworks they are
practically invisible, a fact born witness to by Captain Congreve, V.C.,
in his account of the first reverse at the Tugela. Now of course when
you can't see your enemy you can't very well hit him, so when we clear
our minds of fairy-stories about Lyddite and the universal destruction
wrought by concussion